Illustration Work Process of Meg Hunt

Meg Hunt is a very talented illustrator who, apart from great artwork, really gets it right when it comes to choosing and balancing out the right colours in her compositions. I’ve asked her a few questions on how she goes about doing and promoting her work.

Meg has been drawing since a young age, but didn’t get seriously into illustration until her senior year at college.

‘From there it’s been a slow and steady process of trial and error figuring out where I belong, what I like in my work, what I want to do. It’s an evolution that I’m nowhere near finished going through. I started with minimal colors, trying to emulate the screenprints I made in college but from there I started delving into experiments, becoming less dependent on line, more interested in shape, pattern, and abstraction.

Lately I’ve been fascinated by texture and the more painterly work of concept artists working in gouache and have been trying to loosen my processes so I can learn some new tricks’.

Since college, Meg started working a lot on editorial/lifestyle magazine work, but as time went on and she realised more of her interests, she’s been finding her style being drawn to illustrating for children and for children’s animation.

Her work process involves a lot of computer use, which is good for short deadlines. ‘I use Photoshop CS because it’s all I’ve got but it suits me okay. I try to implement handmade processes along the way. For the past two years I’ve inked my line art with a Kolinsky brush (I’ve been using a #1 Kolinsky Designer brush from Rosemary & Co lately) or with a dip pen (usually a g-nib).

In the past month or so after getting an Wacom Intuos 4 I’ve been trying to play with using the tablet more and cutting back on the line work since I knock a lot of it out anyway. I doubt I’ll entirely lose it though, I love working with a brush and hope to break back into gouache again sometime.

Lately I’ve experimented with scanning in cut painted paper, scribbled brushmarks, charcoal for custom brushes, and ink washes. I love the versatility of playing in Photoshop but I always want to be able to work by hand as much as possible too’.

Meg’s process goes generally like this:

Draw something (usually in colored pencil or sometimes in regular mechanical pencil) on paper, usually bristol board if I’m inking

Ink it (often using white ink over the black after for added interest) or leave the pencil sketch as it is

Scan the artwork or sketch

Color in Photoshop, in layers, often set to multiply

Knock out some of the linework and color the rest

Play with textures

Tweak a lot

Eventually get to a point when the colors hum and I feel done

Celebrate!

For promoting her work, Meg used to use postcards a great deal, but she has been putting that off recently. This is either down to financial concerns or through a fear of not coming up with the best image for clients on a postcard as she could be.

‘I’m hoping to do one in the next couple of months, but in the meantime I’m finding the internet’s pretty good for promotion in the meantime. I’m lucky that I’ve found a lot of great clients and creative friends all over the place just through the internet!’

Currently Meg is devoting a lot of her time to an educational book about myths being published by Oxford University Press. She has also just completed a piece for Terrible Yellow Eyes. In between working on these projects, she is playing with some paint, doing work for a gallery show, plotting new promotions, making more editions of the Pocket Jotter notebooks made last month and much more personal work.

Great article! Not only did I enjoy seeing the beautiful work of Ms. Hunt, but also loved how her illustrating process is described step-by-step. The artwork, with its profusion of colors, patterns and fairy tale/historic (i.e. Anubis? Tribal art?)references takes one back to the magical days of childhood!